Day 9

Where did the time go? I thought I had most of my stuff sorted last night, but packing the bike up this morning has taken longer than expected and now I am in a rush to get down to the ferry in Dalvík.

Once there, they looked at me a little surprised. I go inside the ferry with an older chap (who looked he had been at sea for years) and see a younger man behind a desk. He asked if my bike was booked for today as they have no bikes listed. I show them the email that I was sent from their bookings people saying they will reserve a space for my motorcycle on the same passenger trip that I was already booked on, but unfortunately it turned out that it wasn’t reserved. Luckily, they didn’t have a lot of cargo toddy, so could fit it on. As I spoke to the young man, I enquired about if it was expected for the sea to be calm today. He said, yesterday was calm but there are strong winds today, so it could be quite rocky.

Whilst sitting in the passenger compartment, I realised that I hadn’t taken the motion sickness tablets that were now packed away on the bike.

I kept searching through my jacket pockets were I thought I had some, but none to be found.

I did however have the motion sickness wrist bands, which I promptly put on.

There was no more than a dozen passengers in the upper compartment and as we sat docked I could feel the boat already rocking.

Once we got moving, it got a lot worse and I started to sweat profusely. I tried looking at the horizon, closing my eyes, listening to music, but nothing was helping. The boat was crashing into the waves and spray was coming up all over the windows, so looking out to the horizon wasn’t going to work anyway.

A few minutes later, I was reaching for the sick bags.

To say I felt terrible was a massive understatement, I can’t remember when I last felt this bad. I kept asking myself, why am I doing this? I should have just stayed on the main land.

Then I remember reading online that one technique to over come motion sickness, is to lie flat on your back as you can’t be sick then. Well, I can’t feel any worse can I? I thought to myself.

So with that I went down on the floor and just laid there on my back, with my eyes closed. I was surprised that actually it did make a positive difference, but the ferry floor was very uncomfortable. Oh, and the part about you can’t be sick laying down, horlicks to that. I could feel the contents of my stomach moving about and every now and then, it would be in my throat, so I sat up and puked into the bag, then laid down again.

As I lay there, I could hear and feel the boat rising partially out of the water, then come back down with a thud, over and over again. I then started to get very cold and every so often would shiver uncontrollably.

Oh , and if you hadn’t already realised, the motion sickness wrist bands, DON’T WORK!!

However, I wasn’t the only one, just about everyone else aboard were being ill, I was just  the first!

This all lasted for just under four hellish hours.

Once we were docked, the young man from the check-in desk came to find me and said I could take the bike off now. I didn’t even look for any damage to the bike, I just got on it and rode off the boat which had a short ramp that was at a very steep angle. Going down it was one thing, but getting up it in a couple of days, might be another.

Once riding I followed the road down towards the orange lighthouse at the bottom of the island, mainly to check the bike was running okay, which it appeared to be apart from the sat nav was very dim. Then I took a couple of photos and rode back to the guesthouse that I was booked in.

The lady on check-in told me about the opening times of the one and only restaurant that was just over the road, and that the shop next door was only open for one hour, from 3-4 pm. Blimey, that’s less hours than I work!

Once my bike was unpacked, I just crashed out and laid on the bed, still cold and feeling rather fragile. I set my alarm for 3:30pm so I could get supplies from the shop, but didn’t fancy eating out tonight and would make do with dry biscuits and coke.

I didn’t just choose the biscuits because of their name, for once, I didn’t fancy chocolate ones.